Celebrating a Birthday as Well as a Score

James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim on piano.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

When a multilayered cake was rolled onto the stage at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night to celebrate the 100th birthday of Elliott Carter, it had just a single, long-lasting sparkler at the top. Lighting 100 candles would surely have violated the fire safety code.

Mr. Carter, looking elated and using a cane for support, along with a few helpful hands, walked up the stairs to the stage almost on his own. Waiting for him were James Levine, Daniel Barenboim and the musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who had just performed Mr. Carter’s latest work for piano and orchestra, “Interventions,” with Mr. Levine conducting, and Mr. Barenboim playing the demanding piano part.

The piece had its world premiere on Dec. 4 at Symphony Hall in Boston. But this Carnegie Hall concert on the very day Mr. Carter turned 100 was a milestone in music history. And the 17-minute piece — though brainy and complex, like all of Mr. Carter’s scores — was somehow celebratory: lucidly textured, wonderfully inventive, even impish. This was the work of a living master in full command.

I first heard about “Interventions” in May of last year, during an interview in Mr. Levine’s office at the Metropolitan Opera, when, unable to keep a secret, Mr. Levine pointed to a score sitting on his desk. It was the newly completed manuscript of “Interventions,” commissioned by the Boston Symphony, Carnegie Hall and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, where Mr. Barenboim is general music director. Mr. Carter had finished the piece 18 months early, just in case. After all, who could count on his still being around and active on his 100th birthday?

Not only is Mr. Carter here, but since finishing “Interventions” he has also written a raft of additional works. It is unprecedented in music history for a major composer to be still active at 100. Imagine if Beethoven had not died at 56 in 1827, but had reached his 100th birthday in 1870, still composing significant works? He would have outlived Schumann and Mendelssohn, heard Brahms play his First Piano Concerto and surely attended the premiere of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in 1865. Except that those composers would probably have developed differently had Beethoven, whom they all revered, remained a path-breaking presence in the field.

Mr. Carter’s longevity hit home on this historic evening with Mr. Levine’s inspired decision to end the program, after the Carter work, with Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.” Hearing Pierre Monteux conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the work’s New York premiere in 1924 had a galvanizing effect on the young Mr. Carter, a New York native just 15 at the time.

Stravinsky’s shocking, exhilarating score was just over a decade old. And as Mr. Carter explained in a lively appearance on “Charlie Rose” with Mr. Levine and Mr. Barenboim, which was broadcast on Wednesday night, he was particularly excited by the Stravinsky piece because it divided the Carnegie Hall audience. Some people cheered, others walked out. He wanted in on that action.

Though Mr. Carter’s challenging modernist works have also divided audiences over the years, “Interventions” was greeted with a prolonged ovation at this sold-out concert. The score exemplifies a shift that has taken place in Mr. Carter’s music during the last two decades or so. His formidably complex compositions from the 1960s and ’70s took an almost defiant delight in building up multiple layers of simultaneous, boldly contrasting materials. But starting in the late 1980s — perhaps because he had mellowed, more likely because he had found a way to distill his musical thinking into its essence — Mr. Carter wrote pieces in which a little less was going on at once, and a little more attention was given to making every gesture direct and audible.

Photo

James Levine, Elliott Carter, center, and Daniel Barenboim with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Since Mr. Levine and Mr. Barenboim, two of his most active champions, had requested this piece together, Mr. Carter did not want to write a typical piano concerto in which the piano would dominate. He wanted the piano and the orchestra to be equals. He came up with a dramatic conceit: the orchestra would essentially play a long, sinewy, continuous line of music, but the piano would keep intervening, thus engaging and rattling the orchestra.

Mr. Barenboim has used the metaphor of a social gathering to explain the piece. The piano is like a provocative guest who intrudes on a roomful of chatting people and keeps commanding attention.

The banter that “Interventions” explores is expressed in the opening measures through a musical joke. The orchestra sounds a collective sustained A, the pitch to which the instruments generally tune. But the uppity piano thumps out an intrusive B flat, a half-step up, as if to say, “Take that.”

The orchestra collects itself and starts to play the first statement of a ruminative, restless angular melodic line in fits and starts with astringent harmonies. The piano’s first intervention is a long, volatile solo, with erupting chords and frenzied, keyboard-spanning runs, like an Elliott Carter version of a McCoy Tyner jazz solo. The orchestra then intervenes in turn, resorting, in a sense, to its long-lined lyricism, yet altered by the piano’s challenge.

As the banter continues, the exchanges overlap. Two trios of solo instruments intermittently serve as mediators. And it sort of works. By the final extended section of the piece, the piano and the orchestra have somewhat assimilated each other’s content. And in the whimsical concluding flourish, the A and the B flat are combined in a loud, cantankerous tremolo.

Mr. Barenboim dispatched the technically knotty piano part with command, reveling in its gumption. The orchestra under Mr. Levine played with rich string tone, wondrous delicacy in several pensive episodes and crackly intensity when the out-of-control piano needed to be in put in its place.

Mr. Barenboim had a busy night. He was also the soloist in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, included here, it would seem, because Mr. Carter is a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, but also to place the unconventional Carter score in the heritage of piano concertos. While making the architectonic structure of Beethoven music’s clear, Mr. Barenboim played with impetuous, almost improvisatory expressive freedom, an approach matched in the vibrant performance Mr. Levine drew from the orchestra.

To begin the concert, Mr. Levine and Mr. Barenboim gave an elegant account of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor for piano four-hands, a haunting, melancholic and turbulent work from the composer’s last year. It was a curiously fitting choice. Though Schubert died at 31, he had what could be considered a late period, when his music gained a mystical dimension and became, in its way, more distilled.

Mr. Carter returned to his seat to hear Mr. Levine’s elemental, weighty and wild account of the Stravinsky score. There were rough patches in the playing, particularly in the brasses. But the trade-off was worth it. Surely Mr. Carter was the only person in attendance who had also heard the Carnegie Hall premiere of the piece nearly 85 years ago.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Celebrating A Birthday As Well As a Score. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe